Meet Graham

Graham reminds us how vulnerable our bodies are by exploring what we might need to look like to survive a crash on the road.
by via Awwwards - Sites of the day

Y7K Birthday Party

Crazy One Pager promoting the 2nd birthday of Y7K that happened in July. The colorful Single Page website features a unique interactive 3D hand that spirals while a pianists plays you 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' by Wham!

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

Versioning Show, Episode 7, with Ken Wheeler

In this episode, Tim and David are joined by Ken Wheeler, a Formidable JavaScript programmer well known for open-source projects like Slick Carousel. They discuss the ups and downs of creating and maintaining open-source software, balancing open-source and commercial work, the challenges of fatherhood, and making rap music.

Continue reading %Versioning Show, Episode 7, with Ken Wheeler%

by M. David Green via SitePoint

Logo Design in the Digital Age – Say a Lot with Very Little

Communication in the digital age is more important than ever, millennial living has caused users to experience information saturation and designers must use their skill to cut through the chaos of the modern life. This has led to audiences craving minimal design that they can understand with ease. The key to success is being able to stand out and create a cohesive, digestible message using creative designs. So what minimal trends have taken over 2016 and what makes them work for today’s market?

by Guest Author via Digital Information World

How Information Overload Is Ruining Your Work Life

Information overload is when your brain exceeds its processing capacity and leaves you feeling tired (like when your computer runs out of RAM and your computer crashes). It can also weaken your concentration, leaving you more susceptible to making bad decisions, and as a result, more likely to overload yourself from other sources of information as a means of procrastinating on important tasks. Yep, that’s right, I’m talking about television, the internet, checking emails, watching videos, and anything else that feeds you with information.

Let’s take a look at how information overload can ruin your work life and how you’re probably doing it without even realizing.

Why Your Body Craves Information

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain that affects your productivity, motivation and focus — some even call it the “motivation molecule” because it boosts your drive and concentration while helping you to resist negative impulses.

One of those impulses is the need to feed and I’m not only talking about your dietary intake; your body also craves information. Dopamine induces feelings of euphoria when you exercise, eat, drink, engage with your hobbies, and so on. Many of these things, including information, are addictive.

Basically, anything you do that makes you happy, makes you happy because it releases dopamine into your brain. Most of these things are bad for you (like unhealthy food, for instance) if your intake isn’t moderated. One of the hardest to moderate is your information intake because it only affects your mental wellbeing, leaving you feeling lethargic, unfocused, and sometimes even depressed if you overload yourself with it.

What Information Overload Does to You

Information overload can mean many things. It can mean that you’ve ingested too much of your to-do list at once and you’re feeling a little overwhelmed; it can mean that you’ve used up all of your cognitive capacity scrolling Facebook for the last two hours; it can mean that you’re not filtering your emails enough and you’ve wasted half of the day replying to them.

It could even mean that you’ve watched too many YouTube videos or Googled too many things — internet addiction is a real thing because it also induces dopamine in the body. We live in a world where the internet makes information so accessible to us that we can even become desensitized to dopamine over time, making it much harder for us to achieve optimum happiness.

Attention Fatigue

Information overload can be trigged in many ways, and the result of that trigger is something that we call attention fatigue.

Attention fatigue is when your brain literally shuts down as a result of having too much information to deal with, leaving you feeling unmotivated and tired. In many ways you can limit your information intake, but sometimes (when you simply have too much to do) you can also reset your brain by taking a break. Lets take a look at some ways that we can curb attention fatigue.

How to Break Bad Habits

Breaking bad habits is stressful at first because you’re addicted to the dopamine high that they give you, and you’re also repeating your bad habits because they’ve become a second-nature to you — you do them without even thinking. Here’s a list of things you can do right now to kick these habits:

1. Have regular breaks or optimize your work hours

After some trial-and-error I found that working 4 hours a day (every day) leaves me feeling incredibly energetic, as opposed to a typical 9-5 weekday setup that left me feeling drained.

2. Boost your dopamine levels in a variety of ways

Don’t commit all of your time to one activity; this applies to hobbies and your day-to-day work tasks. Too much of anything will eventually cause boredom and attention fatigue.

3. Don’t start the day with your computer — ever

Don’t waste all of your juice before you’ve even started the day. This is a very common mistake, and the worst one to make!

4. Lock away your triggers (television, internet)

While I’m not a huge fan of television myself, there are TV features that can block access during certain times of the day, and there are a number of apps that can do the same thing for internet access (or specific websites if needed).

Further reading: How to Master the Habit of Forming Good Habits

How to Curb Unnecessary Communication

Reaching inbox zero only to have another bundle of emails flow right in is something I’m sure everyone can relate to. It’s a never-ending story, and even if you manage to finish the book there’s a sequel called “Communication & Collaboration: How to Talk About Your Project As a Team Until It’s Time to Go Home”.

Continue reading %How Information Overload Is Ruining Your Work Life%

by Daniel Schwarz via SitePoint

An Introduction to Chart.js 2.0 — Six Simple Examples

If your website is data-intensive, then you will need to find a way to make that data easy to visualize. Humans, after all, are not wonderful at understanding long lists of raw numbers. That's where charts and graphs come in — they can make complicated statistical relationships obvious and intuitive, as well as more accessibile to non-English speakers. Everyone understands basic charts at the same speed, the same can't be said for paragraphs rife with technical jargon. Using charts when it's beneficial, will make your website easier to understand and visually more appealing.

In this article I'll introduce you to a JavaScript charting library called Chart.js. Using six stylish examples, I'll demonstrate how you can use Chart.js to visualize data on your website, as well as configure it to meet your needs.

Why Chart.js?

I chose Chart.js because it can be learned and leveraged quickly. It's designed with simplicity in mind, yet is extremely customizable. In my experience, charting libraries fall onto a spectrum of complexity, where more complex libraries offer deeper customization, but have steeper learning curves. Chart.js is one of the quickest and easiest libraries to learn that doesn't heavily limit your options. It comes with eight different chart types that will cover almost all of your data visualization needs.

Chart.js is actively maintained to a high standard by the open source community. It recently reached version 2.0, which came with a few fundamental syntax changes to make code more consistent, as well as offer mobile support. In this article, I'm going to use Chart.js 2.0 and it's updated syntax. At the end of this article, after giving you a chance to see how Chart.js 2.0 works, there is a section covering the 1.0 -> 2.0 transition and what to expect when reading old Chart.js examples online.

Installing Chart.js

Again, Chart.js is focused on being easy. Easy to learn, easy to leverage, and easy to install. If you'd like to dive into the actual code, check out the GitHub project.

You only need two things to use Chart.js.

1) The library - for this guide, I recommend using a CDN because it's the easiest way to get up and running fast.

<script src="http://ift.tt/2c5hbLq"></script>

2) A <canvas> element, as Chart.js leverages HTML5 canvas.

<canvas id="myChart"></canvas>

Alternatively, you can use a package managers to download the library. For more information, see the Getting Started guide.

Simple, eh? Now without further ado, let's look at what Chart.js has to offer.

Line Chart

This is all you need to create a minimum line chart in Chart.js. Just put it inside of a <script></script> somewhere in your <body> after you declare the HTML5 canvas.

var ctx = document.getElementById('myChart').getContext('2d');
var myChart = new Chart(ctx, {
  type: 'line',
  data: {
    labels: ['M', 'T', 'W', 'T', 'F', 'S', 'S'],
    datasets: [{
      label: 'apples',
      data: [12, 19, 3, 17, 6, 3, 7],
      backgroundColor: "rgba(153,255,51,0.4)"
    }, {
      label: 'oranges',
      data: [2, 29, 5, 5, 2, 3, 10],
      backgroundColor: "rgba(255,153,0,0.4)"
    }]
  }
});

See the Pen 2 - Line chart by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

If this code looks intense, don't worry! All Chart.js examples follow the above format for the most part, so you only have to learn it once. Lets go line by line to understand what's happening.

var ctx = document.getElementById("myChart").getContext('2d');

This line gets a reference to the <canvas> element we created earlier, then calls the getContext method on it. The getContext method returns an object that provides methods and properties for drawing on the canvas. We store this in a variable named ctx.

var myChart = new Chart(ctx, {
  type: 'line',
  data: // array of line data goes here
});

Here we are creating the chart object. I've excluded the data for a moment to focus on the type property, which determines the type of chart we want. Chart.js' new Chart() constructor takes two parameters:

1. A reference to a <canvas> element that the chart will be rendered on, or a reference to its 2d drawing context (here we are using the 2d context). Regardless of which you use, the Chart.js convention is to call it ctx.
2. An object literal containing the data and the configuration options that Chart.js will use to build your chart. The required properties are type and data. In our example type is 'line' because we want a line chart. data is the data you used to populate the chart.

Chart.js uses array location to determine graph position, so the first point of 'apples' will have the value '12', the second will have '19', and so on. Adding new lines is as easy as adding a new object with a label and data.

Finally, I have set an rgba background color for each dataset to make it more visually appealing.

To learn more about line charts with Chart.js, check out the docs

Pro tip: clicking on any of the legends for the charts ("Apples" and "Oranges" here) will toggle that particular data set. This works for all graph types.

Bar Chart

Bar charts are (mostly) just line charts that look a bit different. By changing one line of our previous example, we can create a bar chart.

type: 'line'

to

type: 'bar'

Yes, it's really that easy.

See the Pen 2. Bar Chart by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

The full documentation on bar charts can be found here.

Here's the full code for this example:

var ctx = document.getElementById("myChart").getContext('2d');
var myChart = new Chart(ctx, {
  type: 'bar',
  data: {
    labels: ["M", "T", "W", "R", "F", "S", "S"],
    datasets: [{
      label: 'apples',
      data: [12, 19, 3, 17, 28, 24, 7]
    }, {
      label: 'oranges',
      data: [30, 29, 5, 5, 20, 3, 10]
    }]
  }
});

Continue reading %An Introduction to Chart.js 2.0 — Six Simple Examples%

by Jack Rometty via SitePoint

Integral

'Integral' is a free One Page WordPress theme suited for a freelancer or digital agency portfolio. This Single Page theme is the free version of the Integral Pro theme priced at $67. The free version has a few reduced sections but still offers the power of WordPress editing using the Theme Customizer. Features include a welcome section, single projects section, skills, testimonials, latest blog feed and a newsletter sign up. A great way to test out the theme before buying the Pro version!

by Rob Hope via One Page Love